Events

1^st Lecture

By Elma Dervic

Title: Multimorbidities - Modelling dynamical comorbidity networks

Abstract: Multimorbidities, the presence of multiple diseases or conditions in a patient, are strongly dependent on age, and they change with patients' aging. In order to observe disease progress, we need to understand disease trajectories and in which directions they change overage. We developed a new, multilayer disease network approach to quantitatively analyze complex connections between two or more conditions and how they evolve over the life course of patients.

2^nd Lecture

By Pietro Saggese

Title: Decentralized Finance: Technical Primitives, Financial Services, and their Composition

Abstract: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a new financial paradigm that offers financial services, such as lending, borrowing, investing, or exchanging cryptoassets without intermediaries. Instead, it provides a range of DeFi protocols that implement these services as smart contracts, which are then deployed in Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) such as Ethereum. Since a profound understanding of DeFi protocols is still missing, in this talk I will introduce a DeFi Stack Reference Model that allows describing the technical primitives they rely on and the financial functions they offer in a structured way. I will begin by introducing the four most relevant DeFi categories, i.e. Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs), Lending protocols, Yield Aggregators, and Derivatives protocols. As the financial functions of these individual DeFi protocols can be composed into complex financial products, I will also discuss how interoperabilty affects the DeFi ecosystem, highlight potential sources of systemic risk, and propose possible quantitative investigation techniques to investigate protocol dependencies. I will conclude by introducing Graphsense, a cryptoasset analytics platform that can be used for extracting data and constructing networks of interrelated DeFi protocols from the transaction and token flow data available in the public Ethereum blockchain.

3rd Lecture

By Tobias Reisch

Title: Economic Systemic Risk in Production Networks

Abstract: National economies rest on networks of millions of customer-supplier relations. Some companies -- in the case of their default -- can trigger significant shock cascades in the supply-chain network, thereby creating systemic risk. I will present an introduction on how to quantify systemic risk in a production network, how to reconstruct the relevant production networks, and highlight some key results.